New Website for APS Journals Goes Live

An updated, more interactive design for the APS Physical Review websites debuted on Friday. The new layout broadens the site’s utility across media platforms and lays the groundwork for future planned improvements. The new site is http://journals.aps.org/.

“We wanted to create a new, modern web design that was mobile friendly,” said Mark Doyle, APS’s director of journal information systems. “The design is to be a single website designed to work on all devices from desktops down to mobile devices.”

The new design brings together some of the latest innovative web styles with legacy features such as the Editors’ Suggestions, Announcements, and News and Commentaries in APS’ publication Physics.

“It’s a more reader friendly, more interactive website,” said Daniel Kulp, APS’s editorial director. “It’s also bringing a different kind of content to the surface.”

The new website design features images on the front page previously only seen in the article PDFs. The design also opens up a space for new tags and “faceting” that will ultimately let users explore the subject matter of a particular article across all APS websites.

The redesign is part of a broader, ongoing update of APS’s web presence. Over the next few years APS is planning to update many of its websites to better link between the society’s different departments based on a user’s interests.

APS has been working since last year to develop and implement the new tags and classification system, which should start rolling out sometime in the next year. “[The design] will cross-pollinate the journals, membership, meetings and outreach,” Kulp said.

“We are receiving a lot of feedback that we are listening to,” Doyle said. “We expect that people will see a steady stream of improvements.”